A Good Screw or a Screw Loose?

Never have I felt so emasculated as when I ventured into my local hardware store to buy some screws and rawl plugs. It seemed like such a painfully easy mission that even a ‘maintenance guy simpleton’ like myself should be able to accomplish it with verve and gusto. After all, I’ve successfully hung pictures and fixed shelves on walls – sometimes I’ve even fluked getting them straight, level and central between other objects! Those had been achievements that had made me feel, temporarily at least, like I really was ‘the guy’.

The problem? Well, since we can no longer hunt dinosaurs and our country is at peace, so we don’t have any wars to fight where I can prove my manliness, plus I’m not even a hi-vis-wearing FIFO worker like most of the ‘real guys’ in Perth, so there are very few ways left to a man to be seen to be plain old ‘manIy’.

 I realise that in this day and age of political correctness, we are all supposed to be gender neutral, but since I’m now officially an ‘old fart’ in my sixties, I can play my ‘throwback card’ and say that I can’t help it – I’m from another era. I grew up in the bygone days when men were allowed to be men, or better still gentlemen, and it wasn’t yet considered offensive or ‘genderist’ to hold a door open for a lady. It also wasn’t frowned upon or considered a racial slur to tell a joke about an Englishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman going into a pub, it was just considered harmless banter, and most of the TV shows I watched whilst growing up would be banned today, but I digress.

Idiot Proof?

As I confidently entered the hardware store, I was struck with the first wave of helplessness. Faced with an overwhelming array of products, I had to figure out which aisle to head for. Now this particular hardware chain has made it practically idiot proof because every aisle is numbered and comes complete with a description of the contents of that aisle. It’s just that they sell so much ‘stuff’ that you could spend a day just reading all the aisle headers, and distracted by all the endcap specials, by which time you’d forget why you even came there in the first place.

Luckily, I remembered that all of their staff have been trained to know everything about everything, and they seemingly have encyclopedic memories for the contents of every single display in the store. I turned to the service desk and saw what looked like a twelve-year-old boy with an attempt at a moustache, wearing a hardware uniform that immediately conveyed an aura of assertive competence. I mean no disrespect – even Police Officers look more like kindergarten escapees with every new grey hair that I sprout and young people in pubs who earn ten times what I do, working as Environmental Geologists, Drilling Assistants or Doggers, look like they shouldn’t even legally be driving yet. I don’t really know what doggers do in Australia, but it sounds like something naughty and potentially illegal where I came from?

“Could you possibly save me some time and point me in the direction of screws please?” I asked.

“Of course, Sir”, he politely replied, “You’ll find them over in aisle ‘whatever’, third fixture down, fourth shelf from the left” or some such detailed response. It’s as if they’re connected to Google in their heads. Not only that, but all the female assistants know way more about any kind of hardware than I’ll ever know, which is simultaneously refreshing and soul-destroying. I mean the thought that what looks like a teenage girl can know more about fixings, decorating and odd-jobbery than a man in his dotage is the ultimate slap in the ego.

The Mission

My mission that day was caused by the fact that I had removed a lockbox I had previously, successfully mounted and was relocating it from the old site to a new site, thus meaning that whilst I had the screws, I didn’t have the fixings to match them because they couldn’t be removed from the wall whence they came. Like the good boy scout, who had unbelievably earned himself a ‘handyman badge’ as a nine-year old in cubs, I came prepared with a sample screw in hand.

I confidently turned the corner into the correct aisle as directed, only for my heart to sink. I was faced with a display of screws and anchors that had more options than a dating website. (I’m not really a deviant – it was legitimately how I met wifey, but that’s another story).

They had screws for decks; for hard wood; for old wood; for metal; for plastic; for outdoors; for indoors; for doors; for fixing the clouds to the sky. They had every conceivable type of screw for every situation on earth. And yet, nowhere could I spy screws that go into walls. I paced up and down, checking and double-checking. A lady came up the aisle with a baffled expression, stating that she was looking for bolts, but had no idea where to start. ‘Thank the Universe, it’s not just me!’ I thought.

“I know right, I just came in here looking for a screw and some plugs” I replied, only realising after she’d gone, that my words might not have come out the way I intended, and I directed her to the helpful assistant.

I found a pack of what appeared to resemble my sample screw, always good to have spares, but I reasoned that this would give me a clue as to the correct plugs to purchase. For reasons beyond my comprehension, what Aussies sensibly call wall plugs had always been called rawl plugs by my father. I had always wondered if that had been a simple spelling mistake, but no, it was merely a cultural expression difference, and he had been the ultimate handyman. My dad was a guy who could take anything that was broken, from a washing machine to a World War Two Spitfire, pull it all to pieces, fix it and reassemble it as if it was brand new. It was always accompanied by suitable manly cursing at the complexity of such undertakings, and often involved botching things with matchsticks, blu tac or other strange make-do’s but that was a trait born of being short-supplied on Malta whilst dodging German bombs.

I surmised that the reason for not having masonry screws, like you’d have masonry drill bits would be that you’d be drilling the screw into a fixing, thus it would accommodate any screw??? It was then that the full horror of my plight dawned on me. The screws for outdoor fixings on rainy Tuesdays by demented seniors, or some such descriptive term, seemed to be about 35 mils. Real handymen never use full words or correct descriptions – they talk in abbreviations and code! All the wall plugs seemed to come in every conceivable length and width, except ones that matched my screw, i.e. 25mils, 50 mils etc.

I pathetically approached the polite young man and confessed my inferior handyman knowledge. I explained what the job involved, feeling just like my mother, who could never just tell a shop assistant what she wanted without a lengthy monologue about why she needed said object, what and who it was for, and where else she had tried unsuccessfully to find it, along with an only slightly abridged version of her life story. Bless her cotton socks, but my Mum either made a shop assistant’s day with her stories or made their eyes glaze over and want to pour petrol on themselves. It could go either way, but she always made friends because of her genuine interest in people.

“Ah, I’d suggest you get the screws for fixing to metalwork, though you could actually just about use any type of screw as long as it has the right end on it” and went into a lengthy discourse on screws, mountings, length and girth etc. They were of course short-staffed, as are we all in small business in Australia, another COVID-19 legacy, so he couldn’t just leave his post to show me. I returned forlornly to the aisle for more inane pacing, now armed with the correct screws, but completely flummoxed as to which wall plug would work, since nothing seemed to match.

Sheepishly, I returned to the counter. “Would these be the right ones?” I enquired.

He examined the products like a wizened tradie who had clearly completed more handyman tasks than I’d had hot dinners. “These screws will do the job for sure, but I’d suggest you get the red ones. You see here in the small print on the back of the packet it matches up the plugs to the screws – suitable for an 8 to 10G, which is a 6mil hole with this length of plug. You see, you don’t want it to go right to the end, blah, blah”. I wondered back to the aisle, pondering whether the screw size had anything to do with G spots and put the blue and green ones back. And it wasn’t just small print, it was micro print!

“Now you’ve got it Sir. These plugs should match these screws perfectly for your job. You see, blah, blah.”

Lesson learned – don’t be afraid, or too proud, to ask someone who knows more than you do about whatever it is you need help with.

The Outcome

The next day, I only drilled one hole out of place and managed to only bend one screw out of shape,  a botch job worthy of Dad’s pride, but still, I successfully and securely mounted the lockbox -yeeha! It turns out that I am ‘the guy’ after all. Just don’t send me to the hardware store to buy a simple thing. I always struggle to find it, yet somehow, I manage to come out with ten other items that I previously had no idea that I needed, wondering how I had managed to exist on this Earth without them thus far.

I also thought back fondly to when I had set up a Hotmail account for my dad when he was 81 years old. Here was a man who, as an engineer used to sign out aircraft as safe to fly – and had the lives of hundreds of passengers in his hands, yet had in later years struggled with the concept of double-clicking a mouse. One of his many wise sayings was, “Remember, old son, everyone has something to teach you.”